True North strong not free

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 606 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Well, Ann Coulter is no longer in Canada, but 30 million Canadians are. So, for the sake of argument, let us take as read the frankly rather boring observation of the northern punditocracy that the whole brouhaha worked to her advantage, and consider instead whether the Canada on display during her 96-hour layover actually works to Canadians’ advantage. Which was the claim advanced by the eminent Canadian “feminist” Susan Cole appearing on U.S. TV to support the protesters’ shutdown of Miss Coulter’s Ottawa speech:

“We don’t have a First Amendment, we don’t have a religion of free speech,” she explained patiently. “Students sign off on all kinds of agreements as to how they’ll behave on campus, in order to respect diversity, equity, all of the values that Canadians really care about. Those are the things that drive our political culture. Not freedoms, not rugged individualism, not free speech. It’s different, and for us, it works.”

Does it? You rarely hear it put quite that bluntly—“Freedoms”? Ha! Who needs ’em?—but there was a lot of similarly self-regarding blather in Coulter Week euphemizing a stultifying, enforced conformism as “respect” and “diversity” and whatnot. “I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind,” wrote François Houle, the provost of the University of Ottawa, addressing Miss Coulter in the smug, condescending, preening tone that comes so naturally to your taxpayer-funded, tenured mediocrity. “There is a strong tradition in Canada, including at this university, of restraint, respect and consideration in expressing even provocative and controversial opinions and urge you [sic] to respect that Canadian tradition.”

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Spare me the therapeutic platitudes

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 1:30 PM - 100 Comments

As readers may recall, a few weeks ago I was invited to testify at the House of Commons about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. While in Ottawa, I stayed at a certain local hostelry that shall be nameless (the Château Laurier). I don’t like to complain. Seriously. I do so much of it for a living that I resent giving it away for free in private. But my room was unsatisfactory in many basic respects, and, a few days after I drew them to the attention of the gal at the checkout desk, an email arrived from the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping, which I quote in full:

“I would like to extend my thanks for bringing these issues to our attention. We truly appreciate Guest feedback, as it enables us to learn and grow from difficult experiences and truly strive to improve the overall Guest experience. Continue…

The case for the seeing-eye horse

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 12:50 PM - 105 Comments

What’s new in the exciting world of Canadian “human rights”?

Well, the other day Kelly Egan of the Ottawa Citizen reported the story of a gay bed-and-breakfast owner allergic to dogs who got hauled in for “mediation” by the “Human Rights” Tribunal of Ontario after he turned away a blind man with a Seeing Eye dog. Douglas McCue, 68, of the CornerStone B & B in Perth, Ont., suffers from acute sinusitis aggravated by exposure to canines. Ian Martin, a blind diabetic, responded with a lawyer’s letter and a demand for compensation that started at two grand and quickly escalated into five figures. Continue…

Harper must act now to protect free speech

By The Editors - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 4:24 PM - 118 Comments

Stephen Harper used to have very clear—and colourful—ideas on human rights commissions and what should be done about them.

“Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society,” he said in a 1999 interview with Terry O’Neill of BC Report newsmagazine.“ It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.” He went on to complain about the “bastardization” of the entire concept of rights in modern society.

Of course, that was back when Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition. Today he’s Canada’s 22nd Prime Minister. And he appears to have lost his fear of totalitarianism.

In an interview this past January with Maclean’s, the Prime Minister was asked what, if anything, he intended to do to halt the encroachment on individual freedom by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in the name of regulating hate speech.

It is an issue of crucial importance to this country and our strongly held traditions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

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Rockin' out against the man with Jason Kenney

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 3:25 PM - 34 Comments

I met Lindy at a party in Montreal once.  He was quite tall. And his girlfriend said she was an actor for medical school seminars. Like Kramer in that Seinfeld episode.

Anyway. Lindy now sings songs about Ezra Levant, apparently. He’s quite popular with libertarians. And, as you’ll see at the end of this video, Jason Kenney.

Tough critique or hate speech?

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 70 Comments

It’s not often a barroom-calibre brawl breaks out in the life of a political scientist. But a serious battle has erupted over a presentation given last June by professor Frances Widdowson, and it could jeopardize her career and help define the limits of free speech in Canadian academia.

Speaking at the 2008 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA), Widdowson, a policy studies professor at Mount Royal College in Calgary, argued our Aboriginal reserve system isn’t working. It encourages unemployment and alcoholism, since there are few jobs on reserves, she said. Policies that encourage First Nations to live separate lives merely prop up a broken system; the best way to help natives achieve health and prosperity is assimilation. Her paper also criticized Aboriginal traditional knowledge, arguing that some claims didn’t hold up to scientific analysis, and discussed a “development gap” between natives and settlers, implying the Europeans were more advanced.

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Fathers and sons

By Brian Bethune - Monday, February 9, 2009 at 4:52 PM - 0 Comments

What everyone remembers about Dan Hill is that song, and what most of us remember about the song is how much we came to hate it. Sometimes When We Touch hit the airwaves in 1977 and never really went away. That was the problem, wryly concedes its creator, who came at times to loathe it himself as much as anyone else. “So many pop stars recorded it, and so many movies, TV shows and commercials featured it, it was bigger than me, bigger than life.” By the time it came to rank among the most-played 100 songs of the past 50 years, it’s “no wonder people hated it, they’d heard it too many times; the damned song was like a dripping faucet that couldn’t be turned off.”

Hill waited for 340 pages of I Am My Father’s Son (HarperCollins), his absorbing hybrid memoir of his own life and his specific relationship with his father, to get that off his chest. And quite rightly too, since Hill is much more than the sum of one song, even one, as he notes, recorded by so many artists that it would take two pages to list the numerous, wildly variant, versions. (What else, it has to be asked, has been recorded by all of the following: Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow, Tammy Wynette, Donny Osmond and Rosanne Cash?) A decade after Sometimes Hill had another string of hits, before a Celine Dion recording of one of his songs launched him on an even more successful career as a songwriter. A more lucrative career too—the combined unit sales of Dan Hill songs now approaches 100 million.

The book covers that aspect of Hill’s life in detail, in an unvarnished account of a business that’s mostly fallen before the Internet, and includes some fine touches from Hill’s vivid memories. A backstage visit with Tina Turner, for one, when they talked about songs while Turner lathered on cold cream, complained of her aches and pains, and morphed before Hill’s eyes “from sexiest woman in the world to my great-aunt Mabel.”

But it’s the personal that dominates here. The Hills are a talented family. Brother Larry is a prominent, prize-winning novelist, who has already tackled much of the family saga fictionally in Any Known Blood (1997). Father Dan—the singer is actually Daniel Hill IV—is a significant figure in the recent history of Ontario, a black American who immigrated to Canada in 1953 with his white wife, Donna, and became the first director of the province’s Human Rights Commission. The Hills were a remarkable couple merely by virtue of their courage and determination in crossing a harshly enforced colour line, and Donna’s recollections of how the personal and the political intertwined in the two families’ reactions to the marriage is one of the high points of her son’s memoir.

It’s a constant of human affairs, of course, that high-achieving, high-powered fathers and equally determined first-born sons with career plans of their own (like dropping out of school to become a musician) have their difficulties. When that age-old story takes place against the backdrop of  the 1960s the father is bound to be The Man personified to an even greater degree than usual. Except that Dan Sr. was the very antithesis of the Establishment to the world at large, however overbearing he was at home. And the world outside, even in the genteel Toronto suburb of Don Mills could be less than welcoming to mixed-race children. I Am My Father’s Son describes a complicated family, in a complicated situation in a complicated time, and does it with honesty and verve.

Megapundit: The poorly located hockey arena as national metaphor

By selley - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 2:30 PM - 10 Comments

Must-reads: Andrew Cohen on the meaning of Scotiabank Place; Jeffrey Simpson and John Ivison on the Liberal platform; Jonathan Kay on the new racism; Konrad Yakabuski on the arts funding fallout in Quebec.

Policy in the age of personality
Nice campaign platform you’ve got there, Mr. Dion. Be a shame if nobody paid any attention to it.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the platform the Liberals unveiled yesterday, says the Toronto Star‘s James Travers. The Green Shift is both necessary and “benign,” he argues, and the “numbers more or less add up. Manageable spending hikes and modest cost-cutting mean there’s not much to reinforce Harper’s caricature of Dion as a defty-lefty disaster waiting to happen.” But the problem is, Travers says, that’s not what this election’s about. “Come Oct. 14, it won’t matter enough that Liberals would rescue the cancelled court challenges program, reverse arts funding cuts or bring diminished foreign affairs back to glory,” he writes. These days, apparently, Canadians vote with their guts.

The National Post‘s John Ivison thinks slightly more of Canadian voters, suggesting they’ll be judging whether Dion is competent enough to effect “an ambitious shift in the tax system that yields a richer, fairer, greener Canada.” Unfortunately for Dion, Ivison believes it’s pretty much impossible to predict whether the Liberal leader can pull it off or not. “If the carbon tax works as the Liberal leader hopes, emissions will tumble as people substitute away from carbon,” he notes. “But if they tumble, so will tax revenue and what will then pay for the $55-billion plan that he has already set in place?” In general it’s folly to think of election platforms and their component cost predictions as anything but statements of “desired, rather than expected” outcomes, Ivison argues. But the Green Shift is ostensibly something much more fundamental and important, and thus more vulnerable to its own uncertainties.

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Megapundit: Climate change—like Y2K, only warmer

By selley - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on Y2K+8; Colby Cosh on gun control.

On Americans, Canadians, and guns
Why we don’t have a well-armed militia, and why maybe we should.

“We are fond of interpreting [Canada's and the United States'] different gun cultures as the product of their origins,” Colby Cosh writes in the National Post, but as recently as 100 years ago, the differences were few and far between: “a housebreaker or robber in Canada could then still expect to be greeted by the nose of a revolver,” and concerned homeowners could purchase their weapon of choice by mail order. The fact that US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s amazing defence of the handgun (e.g., as opposed to a rifle, “it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police”) now “seem[s] to float to us from some alternate universe very far away” is proof, says Cosh, of how “small social differences … can be exaggerated by means of policy within just a few generations.”

The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington, meanwhile, trots out all the usual statistics to show that gun control doesn’t work, including the fact that the murder rate in Washington, D.C. went up after the city instituted the handgun ban that was overturned by the Supreme Court last week. We wholeheartedly support Worthington’s campaign against Toronto mayor David Miller’s hopelessly facile anti-gun campaign, but as usual with these arguments, it’s really just a big mess of chicken and eggs. For example: is Arlington, Va.’s miniscule murder rate in comparison to Washington’s a byproduct of its relatively high rate of private gun ownership, or its relatively rich and well-educated populace? (Answer: it depends whether the gun control opponent is trying to argue that gun ownership reduces crime, or that criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, are the real and only problem.)

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Shafted by Le Stud

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 6:56 PM - 0 Comments

Photo credit: Le Messenger Verdun

Unlike, say, Maclean’s Magazine, Montreal’s Bar Le Stud isn’t much of a family establishment. According to my colleague Richard Burnett, who has written a queer issues column since before Bill Clinton was caught, the Papineau Street staple is a “heavy duty denim cruising bar for bears, cubs and the men who love them.” So you can’t help but cast a hairy eyeball at the Montreal woman who went there for a drink with her pops one sunny afternoon last year, and you can’t help but feel for the waiter who had to point out to her, in no uncertain terms, that Le Stud was a denim cruising bar for bears, cubs and the men who love them. Translation: Get out, please, you’re scaring the bears.

Well, the woman filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, claiming she was discriminated against because of her sex. Yesterday, the QHRC decided Le Stud couldn’t lawfully bar Studettes from the premises. Yay human rights and all that, but wait: this city is teeming with women-only establishments; I can count three yonic-only exercise joints within stumbling distance of Le Stud alone. Shouldn’t they be hauled in front of the HRC? Shouldn’t I be able to change my live 30 minutes at a time as well?

Burnett, who is all for women in gay bars, thinks so. Even though he probably hasn’t seen the inside of a gym since Nixon was caught, he’s going to sign up to Curves et al., and raise human rights hell if they don’t let him in. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he told me.

Or the bear.